


The Uncle (I Never Had)

by dropout_ninja



Series: If We Could Just Be What We Wanted [4]
Category: Transformers: Prime
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cross-Generational Friendship, Friendship, Gen, Not Canon Compliant, Rebellious vs Disciplined, Trauma, Verity is full of bad ideas, other cameos - Freeform, poor decision making
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-29
Updated: 2020-05-29
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:48:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24444592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dropout_ninja/pseuds/dropout_ninja
Summary: Verity insists on meeting the bots that ruined (and saved) her life.  The agents of Unit:E won't let her.  But she's Verity; since when would an order keep her back?
Series: If We Could Just Be What We Wanted [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1761130
Comments: 14
Kudos: 20





	The Uncle (I Never Had)

**Author's Note:**

> Human cussing, smoking, and mentions of violence/gore (undescribed).  
> This is another sequel to If I Could Just Know What You Wanted. Spoilers for/references to that fic are included in here and it probably won't make much sense without reading that story prior to this.  
> Transformers and its characters do not belong to me. All rights go to their respective owners.

Unit:E. What bullshit. 

They apparently (as in, they didn't even exist in her eyes until after Queen Creek had happened and all of a sudden there was a whole gang of humans ready to take care of this mess when they'd been hiding from sight before) were a task force of good, reputable size. Good enough size to have bases set up over the US. Most of these 'bases' equated to a bunch of restricted land with warehouses and hangars and agents.

The agents came in all shapes and sizes, she found. By that, she meant they carried different flairs. Some of them were soldiers. They ran around in olive gear and did their good little soldierly drills together at the same time every day. Some of them were scientists. They didn't run more than a few steps without wearing out. Some of them were _agents_. The stereotypical ones; the 'men in black'. They had their fancy suits and sloppy suits and big loud voices and all the entitlement one could ask for. 

When she asked them for explanations, she got told something stupid. Like...Like 'go to the 13:00 briefing' or something. Because apparently they were only able to be 'briefed' as a big, whole group and not as an individual who was a step away from losing their shits if they didn't get some damn answers. 

Verity was pretty sure she hated those guys. The soldiers were fine and the scientists were fine and the ones with answers they insisted on hiding were annoying as hell. 

She was stuck with them anyway.

* * *

After the giant robot hand had plopped her down in some shed, Verity had resumed her earlier confused panic. She'd crawled up the walls and hung on the open roof to look out at the apocalypse's latest players. 

Unit:E called them 'autobots'. They were apparently US allies. Extraterrestrial allies that Earth had no idea existed. 

The autobots had gone and fought and eventually were left standing in a city of rubble and death. Verity could see their shapes from far away standing around (presumably talking) before they'd gotten eaten by the green light again. 

They were pretty impressive, actually. They'd come in out of nowhere, followed shoulder-man's lead, and gotten rid of all the bugs. 

And they still made no sense. 

None of it had. The adrenaline was real enough, but the situation?

That was about when Unit:E showed up. They had their helicopters and jeeps and groundtroops corralling people together. Survivors, like her. She'd survived _whatever that was._ They were filthy and smelled like piss and crap and had blood from their own injuries or someone elses on them. It was a disgusting bunch of people. There were a little over two thousand of them then. Not that she counted heads or anything. No, the number got touted a bunch of times at the facility. They touted a lot of things back there and none of them actually mattered as much as they seemed to think they did. 

The survivors got directed together and into vehicles and out of the ruined city. They were driven out to some base in south Nevada and unloaded there. Verity had gotten a nice (hah, right) cot among a floor of a couple hundred other cots in one warehouse and was told to stay there. No one was allowed out yet. It was for their own good. This had been a traumatic event. They had to have the situation explained and medical or governmental or mental help administered.

Fantastic.

So she'd stuck around with her cot and trashy showers and big amphitheaters of 'briefings' meant to explain the thing that had happened and what it had likely done to their minds/lives. She'd heard about the 'insecticons' and the handouts being offered to them all and the jumpstart programs being created to put them back into society with 'healing'. 

Verity heard about it all, but she wasn't really listening. She had other priorities.

She wanted these answers from someone who knew what they were talking about. A bunch of stuffy men in black? A couple of military guys trying to manage this weird rescue/trauma thing?

They weren't at the top of the ladder. They were nothing but anxiety triggers, honestly.

She needed the robot police themselves to explain why their fellow aliens had screwed over her life. 

Sadly, none of the Unit:E guys let her make the phone call to the aliens that she kept demanding.

* * *

"Do you feel as if you can't control thinking about it?" the man across from where she was sitting (on a far from comfortable chair, but what more was expected from an office scraped up in a military airplane hangar?) asked. "Does the day enter your mind without permission?" 

What the hell. 

"Does it?" Verity smiled stupidly. "I don't know. You're asking if I keep seeing legs shatter and people mince and the insides that are never supposed to be seen out, right? Shit, look at that: I suppose I _do_."

The mocking tone didn't irritate the other.

Not outwardly at least. She was pretty good at getting peoples nerves up on the inside, even if they were professional enough to hide it. 

"I want you to rate this on a scale for me," the man said as calmly as before. He leaned into his crate and fished out some clipboard for her to write on top of. "0 would mean you have none of these intrusive memories. 1 would mean you have had very few. 3 would mean you have them extremely often. The scale beneath numbers how severe the effects of these memories are; 0 would mean they don't bother you at all-"

Verity finished reading the text besides each item on the chart and glared up from it at him.

"I know how to read," she interrupted. One finger jabbed down at the text. "You've got the instructions written out for me."

It got nothing but a nod and another calm smile. 

Asshat. 

The woman resumed glaring at the paper itself once it was clear the agent wasn't going to do anything that would let her snap on him. After a few minutes of thought (about the stupid human next to her, not the text on the sheet), she checked off her answers and tossed the board back with unnecessary force. He caught it poorly and went straight to investigating her answers rather than commenting on her misbehavior. Verity rolled her eyes and stared at the ceiling for a while in silently obstinate protest. Huh. Would you look at that; it was hideous. Unpainted, cracked, dott-...cracked.

There'd been so many cracks.

In the walls, in the ceilings, in the side of garbage bins before they crushed in on those occupants trying to hide there-

On the road when she ran on, widening with every step behind her, up until the green portal had opened and the robot police had poured out.

She shook her head. God. She had to stop doing that.

"Alright." The man set the clipboard on the arm of his chair and left it to balance there while he crossed his arms over his lap. "I can prescribe something for the anxiety. Nothing permanent, but if you feel that it would help you to have ativan or-"

"You know what would help?" Verity cut him off. 

He went silent to wait for her recommendation. 

Heh, well. He wasn't going to be happy with it.

"I want to meet the aliens."

At the least, he didn't react with as much volume as the others had. But, predictably, he said the same thing they all did. 

"I'm afraid that's not possible," the psychiatrist replied. 

Yeah, sure. And why was it not possible? None of the other Unit:E people could bother to explain that to her. None of the others had bothered to explain why they existed and the rest of the world didn't know those answers either. 

Whatever.

So they said she had to stay put and take enough meds to be docile and just go on in life pretending she hadn't seen the aliens?

They could say whatever they wanted. 

But she'd do whatever she wanted too. 

* * *

They were still in contact with the aliens. She wasn't sure how or where they were doing these meetings, but she could tell they were happening. Verity trailed this one guy- Fowler? Yeah, Fowler. He'd been big in the auditorium briefings. Apparently, he was the official human-alien liaison. She wasn't impressed with his management so far but mainly a whole lot of unwanted memories were responsible for that distaste. 

Anyway, Fowler went in and out of the facility a _lot_. She'd started hatching a plan of ditching here by hiding on his ride but it never went anywhere. Not so much because it was a stupid idea, but because something happened that shook everything else up anyway. 

A lot of somethings. There were meetings and publicized events and all kinds of exciting 'aliens are real and they're making alliances with us!' things. They aired on the televisions in the makeshift emergency tents i.e. warehouses converted to such.

It sped along the process of their stay while also slowing it down. Yes, they got out of the hangars and off their cots. But they were moved to hotels-turned-temporary-apartments and told to go to briefings and meetings and sit in circles to discuss things and-

And she was done. 

She was done mingling with a bunch of other broken humans. 

So she watched the news from her prepaid hotel room and dreamed about a life away from this system that was trying to box her in as it tried to help. The Fowler guy made it on the news alot. Unit:E did too. The aliens were always up there, it seemed like. She'd gotten to know all the names of the important ones. The colorful guy who talked real soft was Orion Pax and apparently he was the forefront of all these alliance efforts. The silver guy who never talked or looked at a camera was Megatron and so far nothing had really been explained about his presence. The giant spiky one was Predaking and he could turn into a dragon. She couldn't even make this bullshit up. 

The funny thing was, she didn't even have a hard time believing it. The metal bugs of death that had landed down in her life had seemingly crushed and stomped on her ability to disbelieve anything. 

And then there was Shoulders. He looked as calm on film as he had after showing up in the middle of a battle and shooting down the bug that would've killed her dead without him. Maybe it was his perpetual state of being. Nothing could take him by surprise. Maybe enough bullshit had stomped out his ability to disbelieve and be surprised at anything. She could buy that. 

Or maybe he just was perpetually surprised and just happened to look calm. There was no denying that option. It was pretty amusing to consider, after all.

Thanks to her hotel television, she had a name for the guy who'd called her a native and dropped her in a shed somewhere. 

Now all she needed was to run across one of these cybertronians in person. 

Why not? They'd crashed her normal life, so she might as well get up close to an alien without being in the middle of a life or death situation. The world owed her that much.

* * *

First she got the contact of the liaison through one of her group mates at the wednesday night meeting. Then she spammed him with emails demanding to speak with him. The agent apparently had enough free time to humor one of the survivors from Arizona and let her rant at him for a quarter of an hour about how stupid and messed up everything was now. 

After he drove off from their meeting place outside, she returned to her room, flopped on the bed, and opened the cell she'd gotten off of him. 

It was perfect. For the first time in a few weeks, she felt perky enough to run outside without feeling like the world was going to collapse on her. So an hour later, Verity walked out of the room with a backpack of what stuff she had here, a new baseball cap flipped backwards on her head, and a confidence she had really missed having. 

She strolled away from the precincts of the hotel and paid a taxi a good chunk of the money she had received since being boarded by Unit:E. The car drove out to some place called Jasper. A real nowhere a year ago and a hotspot of alien activity these days. 

Apparently, Unit:E had influence out here too. Agents, consultants, whatnot. Autobots were reported in the city. Insecticons were as well. Verity hoped very much that she wouldn't run across those. 'Peaceful' or not, that sounded like what her mandatory therapist would call a panic attack waiting to happen. She remembered the way their faces were arranged in a constant smile: the type of smile that said "I would very much like to eat you" in giant fangs and twitching mandibles. 

No thanks.

Verity shouldered her backpack and started off towards nothing at all. She wondered how easy it would be to run across an autobot. Probably...not easy. In fact, it was probably highly unlikely.

Then again, being in a city the same day of an alien attack had been unlikely. Maybe Verity just had a lot of luck- good and bad.

* * *

This time, the day's luck was working for her. 

She'd caught sight of an autobot. It was the blue one, the motorcycle. As a motorcycle, she was hardly recognizable as one of the robots from the news. But Verity had watched the driver disappear into nothing so that a kid could sit down on the seat instead. Normal human drivers couldn't just vanish like that. 

This meant the autobots were in town. She wouldn’t go to all the work finding their hidey-hole only to discover they were all on whatever planet it was they came from. Verity watched the duo drive out from the burger joint towards the desert. There weren't very many roads out there. Not many at all. 

So she grabbed another taxi and directed the driver out onto some old dirty highway.

If it wasn't for the obviously not-human spaceship parked outside, she probably would've missed it. 

But with the spaceship?

Yeah, no one was gonna miss that. 

Verity ran to the hill and crept into the wide open doorway casually. The more confident one acted, the more they went unquestioned. Whatever humans hid out here in autobot central could just leave her alone if she looked like she belonged.

Or maybe there weren't enough humans here to let one go unnoticed. There certainly seemed to be pretty few running around in here.

It was pretty weird. She'd expected it to be another Unit:E place crowded with people. 

Granted, everything felt crowded once the giant robots were in there. And there _were_ giant robots here. Verity pulled up short as the driveway opened into a huge room. 

There were three of them. A smaller (hah) white one littered in scratches, a white and orange one that had popped onto the news a few times, and the blue one with unnecessarily tall shoulders.

They turned to look down at the tiny native who was trespassing in interplanetary territory. 

Alright Verity. Act calm. Don't panic. 

And don't you dare pass out again.

Damn, she'd forgot about that detail. This was actually rather embarrassing if the blue guy happened to recognize her as that one fainty human. 

"Ratchet." The big one shifted back towards the grumpy one. "Is there a new human consultant?"

In other words: is this thing supposed to be here?

It was kinda amusing how tiny she felt when viewed in such an obviously dehumanizing way. 

'Ratchet' said something that sounded far from affirmative. Ultra Magnus looked back from him to the human.

"If you are not authorized to be here, I must insist you leave," he said.

That was it. He caught on and moved on with getting her out of here already.

If none of them recognized her, then she'd just have to remind them. These guys had done way too much in her life to get to run around and never talk to her once.

"You're the guy-" she pointed accusingly. "You're the one that- you ruined my- you saved my-"

Well, he _had_ done both. The former wasn't really his fault though. It was the metal bugs, but they were aliens too. All the aliens had come and made her life exciting and terrifying and sent her to some Unit:E hotel where she mulled over the fact that she'd lost all her old life options. 

Magnus lifted one of those giant metal eyebrows up at her recognition.

* * *

They kicked her out, of course. Apparently, the grumpy old one (Ratchet) had got in contact with agent Fowler after trying multiple options (which did explain the vibrating cell in her pocket an hour or so before) and now he was storming down out of the elevator to deal with their trespasser. 

Verity had done plenty of trespassing in her life, so she wasn't surprised to be called that. An alien base was still far more interesting to be compared to anywhere else like it was the same weighted crime. In her opinion, at least, but it seemed like a fair complaint. This was nothing like sneaking into other blockaded areas. It deserved to be called by a special name.

She got quite the lecture from the old guy. The autobot Magnus had stood over it the whole time and delivered lectures of his own. They were so dry. He was dry. Impossibly so. It had to be some kind of joke. 

With nothing else to do, Verity had pulled the emotional health card. She demanded to be allowed contact for the sake of her poor, damaged, traumatized brain that their very existence in Queen Creek had caused. As much as Fowler looked ready to blow another gasket and Ratchet was complaining, her complaint had still worked (to a degree). She was allowed contact. 

Trying to push her luck, she also asked to be driven back to Unit:E (since Fowler insisted she go back there) in an autobot.

Truthfully, that was just extra. It had nothing to do with getting closure over the insecticon attack or getting a cheap thrill. It was just a novelty and who was she to pass a novelty up?

The smallest one (Wheeljack) had tried to push Magnus into doing it after Ratchet had made it clear he would not. There was a good amount of social pressuring before the blue mech had acquiesced (much to Verity's satisfaction and Fowler's irritation).

That was the day Verity discovered how boring it was to drive anywhere with Magnus.

He insisted on talking only on educational matters and asking for a human perspective on laws and otherwise being quiet. She pried some info from him, but it took real effort to get answers that weren't convolutedly stiff or numbered. Apparently, he worked with one of the autobots she'd met back there in a thing called the 'wreckers'. Verity thought the name was pretty intriguing. Magnus had disapproved of her approval. She'd told him to lay off. He'd done so only after explaining the issues the wreckers had with authority (and laws and morals, apparently). She'd gone back and forth with him on that for a while and tried to figure out if her 'driver' hated the wrecker she'd just met or if they just liked to get each other riled up on purpose. 

One conversation could hardly answer that.

It could hardly answer a lot of things. It certainly wouldn't let her do any more than peek into this other life.

So Verity started making her granted 'contact' and got more of those stories pried out over the phone.

* * *

The hotel was never going to be a permanent option for her. Sure, they made it sound like it could be. They made it sound like they could hold her hand and lead her through life that way.

Not happening. 

But that left her wondering just as much as they did: what _did_ she have? If not here, where was she going to live and what would she do and would she ever leave Queen Creek behind and-?

She wasn't technically supposed to smoke in this room, but no one had stopped her. It stank the rest of the time and the constant smell almost made her question the worth of her temporary hit. She hadn't stopped yet. 

One night, she'd crashed in the bathroom after cleaning a little cut she'd accidentally gotten on her leg (leggings or not, running around barb wire wasn't always a good plan). The ensuing breakdown had been embarrassing and she hated it. She hated that a little blood could make her think of a leg turned into mince meat and that she'd be stuck envisioning that damage over and over. Verity had flopped on the bed after making it out of there and called the first autobot she could.

He was patient through the rant.

It was easy to figure out that he was always rather patient; even when he felt that a conversation was unnecessary and the phone should be hung up, he never did so first. 

He was also way too interested in doing things the 'right' way and told her to go back to Unit:E's offered help. She didn't like the plan. Besides, it sounded too much like some stereotypical parent telling their kid to be smart and get help and she wasn't a kid. 

A few weeks later and she'd been caught trying to hitchhike out of her precinct (after she'd fallen apart at the action of hitchhiking, which brought back everything she used to do and like and couldn't go back to). In the ensuing phone call, she couldn't help but think of that analogy again. 

It was bullshit. She'd never even had the type of parents to call after getting in trouble even when she was still young enough to be pulling that crap. 

But everything was bullshit now, wasn't it?

When an autobot had arrived to pick her up and take her to a waiting (and disapproving) agent Fowler, Verity had felt the strong sense of feeling that _this_ was supposed to be what she did with her life now. Autobots and aliens and being anywhere but stuck in a 'normal' that wasn't going to work anymore.

* * *

After another stupid appointment with a doctor who just wanted to give her referrals to others or else send her to a pharmacy, Verity reentered a facility she hadn't been in for a while.

The Nevada Unit:E district. It was only a few hours out from the hotel/apartment. It was only a few hours out from Jasper, for that matter. Magnus was waiting for her in his robot mode. She liked it better than the whole car shindig. What was the point of being an alien if you didn't show it? The human walked over to where he was standing stiffly and watching the soldiers do their drills. Verity remembered when she'd done the same thing. It had been to pass the time and distract herself. She had a feeling it wasn't the same drive that led him here. No, he looked...melancholy. Nostalgic, maybe? It was hard to tell with him, but she still had a feeling he was feeling sad just by watching. 

"Look at 'em go," she spoke up first because Magnus wasn't going to. The human waved a hand in the soldier's direction. "They're like a bunch of worker ants. Always doing the same thing, every morning."

And late afternoon. They did it on schedule like clockwork. She'd been stuck here long enough to remember the starting time for the morning and afternoon drills. 

"Ants..." Magnus said while he probably consulted the internet or something. It didn't get elaborated on after he figured out they weren't the real point. "They are disciplined. To be disciplined is an achievement; it offers peace and satisfaction that chaos cannot."

Okay, they'd just disagree on that one. Verity leaned against him and waited so that he could keep watching the drills outside for a while.

When they did leave, Magnus was less vocal in his responses to her questions or comments than usual. Finally, he cut over a moment of silence.

"I am returning to Cybertron."

Verity felt something inside her ribcage constricting. Panic, was it? That was stupid. Nothing to panic about here.

"Guess I'll have to find a new taxi," she replied. 

Even if there was no face inside the vehicle, she could just tell he was frowning.

"You cannot keep making Autobot Outpost Omega One run errands to retrieve you when you call us," he said. 

No, she _could_. She just _shouldn't_. But there was a difference there.

"So you're, what, leaving tomorrow?" Verity changed tactics casually. "Tonight?"

"Tonight."

Great. That was fast. The news did say they didn't stick around long. He was probably only there to do something official with US lawmakers. She'd been a distraction, not a purpose. 

"Can we go by the base first?" she asked. 

Magnus allowed that much.

* * *

As she'd thought: it turned out Magnus was there in Nevada for some diplomatic law/treaty making thing. 

That meant he had to come back more than most of the others, in some ways. 

It gave her ideas too. Verity knew she shouldn't get any, but come they did.

After an hour or so of watching Wheeljack moving from harassing Ratchet to Magnus back and forth, she decided to reenter the spotlight. The human hopped off the couch and drew their attention over to where she was waving.

"Hey. Can I stay?" she asked bluntly. 

There was a disapproving frown in return and it wasn't just from Magnus. The medic looked appalled by her question.

"Come on. I can help. Hell, I can file your paperwork if you want."

There were even more enticing offers ready too. But the wrecker in the back was already laughing. Magnus visibly ignored him (in other words, he was doing so with visible effort).

"Why would you wish to do that?" he asked evenly. 

Because what else was there?

Go back to hitchhiking around and pickpocketing things when most streets would remind her of Queen Creek?

Go find a job and stick herself in some parody of 'normal' life?

Neither was ever going to work for her. Definitely not anymore. 

"I've told you before," Verity shrugged. "I can't fit with anything out there right now. I'd do better here, with you guys."

Ratchet scoffed long and obviously loudly. But the big mech was thinking silently no matter how much the doctor seemed to want anything but more humans near him.

"There are...chores...around this base and in my ship that I suppose could be attended to," Magnus said slowly. 

He sounded so unsure about it all; let a human near his things? Pft, probably against all sorts of codes. And he was very much in love with all his codes and rules. It was his own charm, honestly. 

"Great." Ratchet groaned. "Now we've got another one."

She flipped him off (discreetly enough; Magnus was all against 'vulgar' things) while Wheeljack snorted once more. 

"Never thought I'd live to see the day old Mag's would be adoptin' a native," he grinned.

And she hadn't thought she'd live to see the day that she'd actually give a hearty effort to obeying rules or keeping a job as a glorified janitor. 

But- maybe it was the trauma speaking, but it was there regardless- she felt like things really weren't meant to go otherwise. 

"I have not 'adopted' anyone," Magnus protested flatly. "I have taken on an intern."

There, now it sounded all official. There was no wiggling out of this one now. 

And Verity didn't even think she wanted to. 

**Author's Note:**

> After writing chapter 59, I couldn't resist the opportunity to bring her back in a oneshot of her own.  
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
